Collect and Publish Customer Reviews

You have the option of publishing your Verified Customer Reviews in a separate tab of your full-screen scheduling page. First, make sure that you have enabled reviews, under Customer Reviews in your Settings tab.

When reviews are enabled, clients receive a review invite email 24 hours after their first appointment with your business, then again at 90 day intervals for as long as they continue making appointments with you. This ensures that every review you receive is from a legitimate, existing customer.

On the Customer Reviews page (Settings > Customer Reviews), you can also choose whether or not to automatically publish new reviews. Choosing NOT to automatically publish reviews gives you the opportunity to read them before you decide to share them with the world. Genbook will notify you, by email, each time you receive a new review, so you don't have to worry about them slipping through the cracks.

Another important thing you can do on the Customer Reviews page is determine whether client names will be published, or hidden to protect your clients' privacy. 

Here's what the Reviews tab of your scheduling page will look like:

Click to enlarge

The latest reviews also show up in the "Make an Appointment" tab, under your business details.

Click to enlarge

The Reviews tab

You already know you have the option of publishing client/customer reviews. Now, here's a bit about more the Reviews tab, where you can see and manage all of your Genbook Verified Reviews.

Here's what your Reviews tab will look like:

On the upper right, you'll see the option to preview the review invites your clients receive, so you can see what they see when being asked to provide feedback about their appointments. Just click on "Customer Review form" to see what they'll see.

Clients will have the option of associating their names (either the full name or first name and last initial) or choosing "Other" and entering a name they feel gives them more privacy. The level of detail clients give about themselves and their appointments is totally within their control when they submit reviews.

In the Reviews tab itself, to the left of "Received," you'll see a little dropdown menu that, when you've got a review selected (ie: the box next to a review checked), will give you several options of what to do with that review.


As you can see, you have the option of publishing the review you selected (if the review were already published, then "Unpublish selected reviews" would be an option). You're also able to choose whether you'd like new reviews your business receives to be published automatically, without giving you a chance to look at them.

Many businesses choose to see the reviews before allowing them to be published. Manually publishing and unpublishing reviews can take up to 24 hours, so don't worry if you see "Pending Publication" under Status after you've made a change.

Because reviews are a great way to inspire confidence in your business, you should take advantage of the various options we offer for promoting your published reviews across the Web. You'll find these options at the top right of the Reviews tab page. You can share your reviews via your Twitter feed and on your personal Facebook profile (not to be confused with including the reviews in the BookNow App on your Facebook business page, as part of Genbook Promote).

You can even post a "Read Verified Customer Reviews" button on your website.

Click on the "this button" link, then follow the instructions for adding the Reviews button (Tip: It's just like adding the BookNow button to your site).

In the same way that the BookNow button takes clients directly to your online appointment scheduling page, the Reviews button will take them directly to your published Reviews page.

Check out our video tutorial on capturing and publishing client reviews:

Invite your customers to book online!

Genbook's Customer Invitation Tool makes inviting your clients to make their appointments online quick and easy.

Go to your Settings tab and click on the "Invite your clients to schedule their appointments online" box at the bottom right of your screen.

Not only can you invite clients directly via email, but you can also easily share your booking link over Facebook and Twitter, with our handy buttons. For email invites, you'll have several options: input each email address you'd like to add manually, import contacts from the contact list in an email account, or import a CSV contact file.

To import, first click "Retrieve Contacts".

Next, enter your email address and password for the account from which you want to import contacts. (Don't worry, Genbook won't store your email password or access your email. We only need it to access your contact list.)

Click to enlarge

If you select to import a CSV file from your computer, make sure the first three columns of the document are First Name, Last Name and Email Address, for the import to work smoothly.
 
Next, select which of your contacts you wish to add to the invite list.

On the final page, you'll see the email addresses of all the people you successfully invited to book online with your business. All of these contacts are also automatically added to your Customer Database (found in the Customers tab).